Thursday, June 23, 2005
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Why You Should Stop Watching Movies And Watch The Sky
A strange day in the news to be honest:
It's raining frogs in Serbia
07/06/2005 15:04
Belgrade - Thousands of tiny frogs rained on a town in northwestern Serbia, Belgrade daily Blic reported on Tuesday.
Strong winds brought storm clouds over Odzaci, 120km north-west of Belgrade, on Sunday afternoon, but instead of rain, down came the tiny amphibians, witnesses said.
"I saw countless frogs fall from the sky," said Odzaci resident Aleksandar Ciric.
The frogs, different from those usually seen in the area, survived the fall and hopped around in search of water.
Belgrade climatologist Slavisa Ignjatovic described the phenomenon as "not very unusual".
"A wind resembling a tornado can suck in anything light enough from the surface or shallow water. Usually it is just dust, but sometimes also larger objects," Ignjatovic told Blic.
(c) News24
Severed leg falls from SAA plane
07/06/2005 20:21
New York - A human leg fell from a South African Airways plane on to a suburban New York home on Tuesday as the aircraft prepared to land at John F Kennedy Airport.
Police said a Long Island resident living about 9km from the airport called to report that a leg with a sneaker on the foot had hit the roof of a garage and bounced into the back yard, where it was lying in the grass.
More remains were found inside the wheel well of the SAA aircraft, arriving from Johannesburg via Dakar, Senegal.
A spokesperson for the federal aviation administration, Jim Peters, said a customs agent meeting the plane discovered another leg hanging from the left-wheel well section.
South African Airways issued a statement saying that it had "a stowaway situation where remains of a human body were discovered in the wheel well of an SAA aircraft bound for New York out of Dakar, Senegal".
The severed leg with a part of the man's torso fell on to the home of Pam Hearne, who said she heard "a loud crash" and thought at first that her neighbour was loading a van.
She discovered the leg a few hours later.
"But I am very glad that I live where I do," she said, "so I don't have to run for my life like this man probably was doing".
There have been cases of stowaways being crushed by the mechanism in aircraft wheel wells and dying from the extreme cold at high altitude.
The airways statement said: "SAA is working with the airport authorities in both the United States and Senegal to investigate this tragic event."
It offered assurances that "there was no danger to the passengers of the aircraft at any stage".
(c) News24
Friday, June 03, 2005
Stretch your young body
One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.
"What's happened to me," he thought. It was no dream. His room, a proper room for a human being, only somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls. Above the table, on which an unpacked collection of sample cloth goods was spread out—Samsa was a travelling salesman—hung the picture which he had cut out of an illustrated magazine a little while ago and set in a pretty gilt frame. It was a picture of a woman with a fur hat and a fur boa. She sat erect there, lifting up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm had disappeared.
Gregor's glance then turned to the window. The dreary weather—the rain drops were falling audibly down on the metal window ledge—made him quite melancholy. "Why don't I keep sleeping for a little while longer and forget all this foolishness," he thought. But this was entirely impractical, for he was used to sleeping on his right side, and in his present state he couldn't get himself into this position. No matter how hard he threw himself onto his right side, he always rolled again onto his back. He must have tried it a hundred times, closing his eyes so that he would not have to see the wriggling legs, and gave up only when he began to feel a light, dull pain in his side which he had never felt before.
(c) The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka